Family Friend Poems

Poem of the Week for: 08/14/2018 - 08/20/2018

This week's extraordinary poem, The Invitation, packs enough profundity to fill a book. The author, Oriah Mountain Dreamer, did in fact write a book based on her famous poem. In the author's own words here is how the poem came to be. 

"I wrote the prose poem, The Invitation one night after returning home from a party. I don’t usually attend parties but on this occasion, berating myself for being anti‐social, I made an effort to go and be friendly. I returned home feeling frustrated, dissatisfied with the superficial level of the social interaction at the party. I longed for something else.

Years before I had attended a writing workshop where poet David Whyte had given us a writing exercise, based on a poem of his own, where we began alternate lines with the phrases, “It doesn’t interest me. . .” and “What I really want to know is. . .” Using this form I sat down and wrote The Invitation as an expression of all the things I really did want to know about and share with other."